There is something translucent and innocent in the way light from a new-day sun flows down the brassy sides of the high buildings of the city. I’ve lived here for three years (still believing in the goodness of the city) while occupying and honouring this life-season and its change. Change will come again, perhaps a lasting call from the skunk, or the weasel, but for now the towering windows made wavy by light and warmth are my reality, and at moments they are, as well, my enchantment. 
It’s late spring and folks are waking earlier. The early energy that pushes leaves from sheaths and green shoots from hard-pack is moving toward its first apex, and as it does it spills over and moves into our cells and opens passages long closed from dry cold. And this is the energy I tap to visualize the release of pain for my own daughter who reluctantly sends me lines of poetry I’ve asked for, knowing that in them I’ll see a dark-tinged mind, a shadowed soul, and all the blueness brought on by pain. That “…cold of deepening blue [that] closes around [her] thoughts,” is what she hopes to hide from her company. To protect them, this mastitised knot of pain she keeps secret.
But because dark and shadowy is precisely what she is not, I meditate for her. I visualize the dark-red recesses and as I go deep within I plant small prayer-balms, like seeds, smaller than sweet-clover. And then I see their growth and how they reopen channels…and you might just now think of an episode of “House” where the camera apparently races through arteries and capillaries to an oily-black clot…the clot’s deliquescence the resolution–but this scene is inadequate. The energy I envision is different. It’s fillagreed energy, delicate and inviolable. You may call it God’s own poem, the lines of which wash down the calcified sides of hurt and find a way through the crusts of pain.
—
On those early mornings, when the hours are still dark and I’m half-mad with scenarios, I meditate and visualize–a friend calls it beseeching the universe– first for my own, and then, for calm and peace and mercy for the many. Because, as my daughter has taught me (especially through the months she was caring for a painfully incapacitated woman) you can’t empathize globally until you embrace the particular. (And here’s your particular embrace.)
It seems to me untrue that words are just words…. they can be as real as a glass of water or a warm blanket, and the beauty of the deeper realities they convey — realities of hope and love against those of pain and fear — offers its own moment of comfort to those in pain….love to you and deb and teryl.